On Wednesday (13th) we went on a day trip with our pals Paul and Ian to see the worlds biggest carved stone Buddha. We drove to Leshan which is to the south of Chengdu it took about 3 hours with Jane, Paul and Ian squished into the back seat of a mini mini van whilst Mark was able to stretch out and enjoy the space of the front seat although he did have to watch closely all of the near collisions due to the crazy driving (this driver did use his indicators occasionally which was a bonus).
We arrived at the Buddha and had a walk around his big head (bigger than Janes) and then decented down the stairway cut into stone down the side of the Buddha. The Buddha is carved into the stone on the side of a cliff face and was built between 618 and 907. It is 71m tall, his shoulders are 28m wide and his toenail is the same size as Janes bum. There was also lots of little Budda scenes carved into the stone which had weathered and were really cool. We had a walk around the scenic area which was lovely. We dared each other to go into the dark caves where they kept the monks corpses and tried to scare other tourists.
After all this excitement we had another 3 hour drive back to Chengdu and a well deserved massive dinner; lunch had been a bowl of cold salty noodles and a sausage on a stick for paul.
Today (14th) we went to see the pandas again, awesome we also decided that the red pandas are quite cool too, we named one munchie. Jane leaned on some panda poo, by mistake.
We also met up with our pals Paul and Ian and also other pals we met in Xi'an (Anna and Chris) for dinner. We decided that we really had to have hot pot which is the local speciality in this province. Not only is it hot in temperature it is also hot hot hot as in spicy hot. The restaurant was a nice locall one with lots of friendly people who also seemed to be finding the hot pot really spicy (guess you dont get used to it with time). The mushrooms were the worst because they seem to suck up all the spicy stuff, but it was pretty good fun anyway.
We all went back to the hostel for a few drinks and Mark got to bed at 4am after staying up causing trouble with Paul and Ian.